Official Armadillo Q&A thread

After looking at the design for the suborbital vehicle ( http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/aircr ... 50x691.jpg ), I was wondering what the plan is if the engines fail to restart on the descent? It didn't look like there is anything on top of it that could act as a parachute or whatnot

That's a pretty old design, don;t think they are looking at that anymore (shame -looked pretty cool).

As to engine restart - if it doesn't restart, well, you are probably a a bit stuffed whatever you do. Would need a very large parachute to bring everything down in one piece, probably too large to actually carry. Might be possible for the passengers to have individual chutes I guess. Unmanned flights? Does it matter?

What about those rescue parachutes for small sports aeroplanes? Or would this vehicle be significantly heavier?

Yes, that is an old design. Not saying something like that will never be tried, but at the moment we're thinking more of the direction seen in the conceptual animation towards the end of this year's progress video. Plus, never mistake an artist's conception for an engineering plan

For those who might care, or know someone who might (I know we have fans who do), I have added closed captions to the 2010 Space Access Society video.

The new design looks like it has a passenger (?) module on top of a propulsion module. They could possibly use a parachute to orient the vehicle before restart (like in their recent flights), and if ignition fails, separate the propulsion module so that the passenger module is light enough to land under the parachute alone, sacrificing the engines to save the pass^H^H^H^H spaceflight participants.

I let them know I was looking in early May and left in late June, and there was a formal two weeks at the end, so yeah, it didn't come as a surprise to anyone. It was nice to leave on top, with that restart flight and a perfect flight record, in terms of safety and not crashing.

The Dallas area has been far nicer than I initially expected. I live next to a big lake, which is a nice change from the desert.

I'll be working on getting more regular updates out. There is the regular back-and-forth in AA, so we'll find a middle and hopefully move toward to again being the open company that made me interested in Armadillo in the first place.

Ben

The boys understandably want to keep their edge. They need to protect it from the likes of... you. Now that you are on-board, however. One thing I have realized from Armadillo and Open Source software is that the one thing you can't copy is effort. Detailed instructions on how to make a rocket, does not make a rocket. I don't think you guys have anything to fear. The team will always be better than a copycat simply for having experience and drive.

Cheers and congrats on getting out of the desert. unfortunately now you have no hills and scrubby little things they call trees. Not everywhere can be northern Mi though. All we lack is tech and proximity to the equator.

http://twitpic.com/2a0tza

That looks to be a 48" tank at the very least, unless James has shrunk. James, have you shrunk? Thanks for putting that up Ben. Now the question that we the people would probably like to know is, 'what shape of rocket is that tank going into?'

Is it the base for the quad at the end of the space access video?

One a second note I recently read what seemed to be an error riddled piece from the Dallas observer. http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2010/07/nasa_turns_to_caddo_mills-base.php

They seemed to indicate that AA was actually in the running to build a real lunar lander, not just an earthly test bed. The context-less quotes from Phil seemed to back that up. Care to set that one straight?

Question for anyone on the team: since you're flying more and more, and you eventually plan to fly every day, do you have any plans to recycle or reuse helium to save money? The separate helium manifolds on the T2 rocket racer, one for fuel-contaminated-helium, one for oxygen-contaminated-helium, look like they would be good for recovering helium.

Also, now that you have a dedicated propulsion guy in Ben, would this be a good time to revisit E85 as a cheaper fuel than ethanol?

edit: never mind, I'm blind

48", on the nose.

We are continuing to work with Nasa, and if they get internal funding for the project, it is entirely possible that Armadillo hardware could end up on the moon. How cool is that?

We don't currently reuse helium, and in fact use it in some places where it's not really necessary. It is expensive, but it would require a lot of infrastructure to capture and repressurize it on the pad, then remove fuel or oxidizer vapors and repress it to a useful level.

It'll be something we keep in mind, but it's not worth it right now.

While I don't have any exact figures, I believe that, since we can only know position and momentum disproportionately to each-other and in the case of a lander on the moon I really don't know either very accurately, it is safe to say that it just might approach absolute cool.

Is the 48" tank for NASA work or Space Adventures work? I have to assume space adventures because NASA is probably authorized funding away from needing the test mule 2.0

~Daniel

very nice update:
http://armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armad ... ews_id=371

That aerodynamic rocket and new landing gear look very nice!


Edit: Ben, some of the pictures at the end of the post do not point to their bigger version but to the last picture.

They seem to be working for me, Matt might have caught them already. Can you check again, and say which one if it's still doing it?